The Life of William Morris/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
ILICET
It was his last finished work. His weakness was already so great that the ambiguous reports of professional advisers could no longer conceal the fact that the end was not far off. He still, on days when the depression of his illness was less severe, cherished the hope of going on with the great Froissart, which was to be a sister volume to the Chaucer, and with the sumptuous folio edition of his own "Sigurd the Volsung." The series of woodcuts for the "Sigurd" from drawings by Sir Edward Burne-Jones had been already planned, and a number of designs for them made. In May Burne-Jones, though with but little hope that the work could ever be carried out, had offered to increase the number of these pictures to forty. The proposal had been joyfully accepted by Morris, and roused him for a little into fresh life. His daily work was now mainly designing borders for the "Sigurd," and he still was able to do a little at it every day. Before either of these large works, however, another small book was to have been printed, which would have been one of the most beautiful products of the Kelmscott Press. This was the tale of "The Hill of Venus," to be written in prose by himself and adorned by the twelve exquisite designs made by Burne-Jones for the story nearly thirty years before.
At the beginning of July he completed his collection of painted books by a Psalter which for style, colour, and execution was the finest of them all. He gave it the name of the Windmill Psalter from a windmill which was prominent in the design upon the page next following the "Beatus." This book, a folio of about the year 1270, had been acquired, with several leaves missing, about five and twenty years previously, by Mr. Henry Hucks-Gibbs, now Lord Aldenham. Four of the missing leaves were, however, extant, and had been sold many years before by Ellis to Mr. Fairfax Murray, who after much solicitation had consented to exchange them with Morris for five sheets of drawings on vellum by an Italian master of the fifteenth century. Lord Aldenham's book was exhibited among the English manuscripts collected and shown in the summer of 1896 by the Society of Antiquaries in their rooms at Burlington House. To that exhibition Morris also lent the four leaves in question, together with six of the best of his own English painted books. They were placed next the book to which they had originally belonged. When Morris went with Burne-Jones on the 5th of June to see the collection, the relationship of the two portions of the book was obvious.
"We looked," Morris writes exultantly the next day to Ellis, "and lo! there was no doubt—there was the book with the due hiatuses. And now, whatten a book was that, my man? Why, as soon as I saw its second leaf, I recognized it as the book which I saw in your shop hi Bond Street, and which I have talked so much to you about, and which you told me you sold, or some one else sold, to Hucks-Gibbs. Are you thunderstruck? But now the question is, How am I to get hold of the Hucks-Gibbs 'fragment'? Perhaps you can suggest some course of procedure. Come up and talk about it."
Finally, after much debate, Morris wrote to Lord Aldenham explaining the case, and offering him ₤1,000 for the Psalter. He was out of town; and the three days that passed before his answer came were spent by Morris in much agitation. At last the answer came.
"Letter in morning," Morris notes in his diary, "from Lord A., kind and friendly, will let me have the book. Sent Cockerell after it with cheque in afternoon, and it came back at 4: a great wonder."
There were two other books in the exhibition at Burlington House which he coveted as much or even more. One was the famous Apocalypse from the Archbishop's Library at Lambeth, "a book with the most amazing design and beauty in it." This was, of course, unattainable. But the other was in private ownership; it was a Psalter, even finer than Lord Aldenham's, belonging to the Duke of Rutland: "such a book! my eyes! and I am beating my brains to see if I can find any thread of an intrigue to begin upon, so as to creep and crawl toward the possession of it." He entered on negotiations, and offered a much higher sum than he had paid for the Windmill Psalter, but in vain; and this last pleasure was denied him.
For the greater part of June he had been, by medical advice, staying at Folkestone to try the effects of change of air, but without any beneficial result. His nervous prostration had by this time become very great. The news which he learned on the way down to Folkestone of the death of his old friend, John Henry Middleton, completely broke him down. "I did like him very much," he wrote mournfully to Lady Burne-Jones a few days afterwards: "we had a deal to talk about, and much in common as to our views of things and the world, and his friendliness to his friends was beyond measure." But he enjoyed strolling about the harbour and walking on the Leas, and on one very fine bright day he managed to go to Boulogne and back with Mr. Cockerell. Relays of friends came down to keep him company: Sir Edward and Lady Burne-Jones, Mr. Ellis, Mr. Cockerell, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. E. Walker, Mr. Catterson-Smith. On the 24th of June the first fully bound copy of his Chaucer was brought down to him by Mr. Douglas Cockerell, and was approved by him as in every way satisfactory. On his return to London early in July, he went to report himself to Sir William Broadbent. "He thought me a little better (I'm not), and ordered me a sea voyage."
The voyage fixed on was one to Norway, on an Orient liner which was making a special trip as far as Spitzbergen for the solar eclipse of that year. It was hoped that the keen northern sea air might prove beneficial, and that the historic associations of Norway might serve to alleviate the monotony of the voyage. Much to his satisfaction, his old friend, Mr. John Carruthers, the companion of other journeys in previous years, found himself at the last moment able to go with him. They started on the 22nd of July. The last entry in his diary had been made on the 20th.
But the voyage, whether wisely counselled or not, was not happy either in its progress or in its results. His beloved books and manuscripts had to be left behind: he suffered from almost constant weariness and restlessness: he was not able to make any excursions inland, and the melancholy of the firths struck a chill on his spirits in spite of fine weather and warm suns. Off Bergen a last gleam of the Viking spirit came over him as he gazed on "the old hills which the eyes of the old men looked on when they did their best against the Weirds." But his own fighting days were over.
He stayed at Vadsö near the North Cape for the week in which the steamer went on to Spitzbergen and returned. On the morning of the 18th of August he arrived again at Tilbury, with only one anxious wish, to get away to Kelmscott as soon as possible. But his illness took a serious turn a day or two afterwards, and the doctors had to forbid his removal. He never left Hammersmith again. He was so weak now that he had to dictate the few letters he wrote, though on some days he did a little designing of letters and ornaments for the Press. To his old friend, Mr. Thomas Wardle of Leek, who had written pressing him to try the effect of rest and the pure Derbyshire air at Swainslow, he wrote as follows, the body of the letter being dictated and the signature added feebly in his own hand:
"August 26th, 1896.
"My dear Wardle,
"It is very kind of you to invite me to share in your paradise, and I am absolutely delighted to find another beautiful place which is still in its untouched loveliness. I should certainly have accepted your invitation, but I am quite unable to do so, for at present I cannot walk over the threshold, being so intensely weak. The Manifold is the same river, is it not, which you carried me across on your back, which situation tickled us so much that, owing to inextinguishable laughter, you very nearly dropped me in. What pleasant old times those were.
"I am yours very truly,
"William Morris."
On the 8th of September, with some difficulty, he dictated the last dozen lines of "The Sundering Flood" to Mr. Cockerell, and seemed to find relief in having been able to bring it to a conclusion. The last letter he had been able to write himself was one of a few lines to Lady Burne-Jones, who was at Rottingdean, on the 1st of September. "Come soon," it ends, "I want a sight of your dear face."
During his absence two more books had been issued from the Kelmscott Press. One of them, "Laudes Beatæ Mariæ Virginis," consisted of a series of Latin poems to the Virgin, from an English Psalter of the early thirteenth century which was one of the manuscripts in his own possession, and one of extreme beauty as regards both writing and ornament. For the first time he had, in this beautiful little volume, tried the experiment of printing in three colours. The result was entirely successful, and the effect of the red was much enhanced by the fine blue which he used as the third colour. The other book was the first volume of a sumptuous eight-volume edition of "The Earthly Paradise." A second volume was issued in September. The remaining six, all of which include borders and half borders specially designed by him and not used in any other book, were completed and issued after his death. In these posthumous volumes, however, there are three borders which had been designed in Morris's manner by Mr. Catterson-Smith; these being the only instances of any letter, border, or ornament (with the exception of a little Greek type which occurs in two books) printed at the Kelmscott Press and not actually designed by Morris himself and drawn with his own hand.
Among the projects that had dated from the earliest days of the Press were two which various circumstances had from time to time put off, and which were now once more much in his mind. One of these was the printing of a selection of mediæval English lyrical poetry. He had discussed the plan of such a book with Mr. Wyatt when they were working together at "Beowulf," and just before he started on the voyage to Norway Mr. Wyatt had sent him a list of early English poems for consideration. But he was too weak then to do anything with it. The other proposed volume was one which lay even nearer his heart; it was a volume of the Border Ballads, which had been his delight since boyhood, and which he often maintained to be the highest achievement in poetry which the language had to show. This also had been planned years before; and early in 1894 he had been discussing the thorny question of a text with Ellis. He had persuaded himself that it was possible to form such a text by selection from the different versions. "You see," he said, "no one version has more authority than another; it is a matter of literary merit;"—and no doubt were the formation of such a text at all possible, it would have had its best chances of success in his hands. During this autumn, when he was too ill to do anything else, he amused himself by having the ballads read aloud to him and beginning to form his own version. Mr. Ellis, who was daily with him, and who did most of this work for him, was well aware that the selection could never be completed, and no longer argued the question with him.
Among the larger unexecuted projects which had at one time or another been formed for the Kelmscott Press, the Shakespeare in three folio volumes, which had, been announced in 1893, had been definitely abandoned, and the reprint of the English Bible of 1611, though not formally given up, had receded into a problematical future. The "Sigurd" and the Froissart would have been the work of at least two years; and after them the next work planned was to have been a volume of even greater magnificence than the Chaucer, a folio edition of Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," for which Sir Edward Burne-Jones was to design at least a hundred pictures. With the added experience and increased technical skill now available, it should have eclipsed even the Chaucer in splendour of design and beauty of execution. Of other items in the mass of work which lay before the Press, an account is given in the last book issued from it before it was finally wound up in March, 1898. In that little volume Mr. Cockerel! has added to Morris's own account of his aims in founding and conducting the Press, a description of its inception and progress, and an annotated list of the books printed at it, with a fullness, lucidity, and accuracy which leave nothing to be desired.
Morris himself was now known by his friends to be a dying man. On his return from Norway congestion of the left lung had set in, which remained persistent, and the general organic degeneration made steady progress. His old fear of death had long left him, but his desire to live remained almost as strong as ever till he became too weak to desire anything. As the power of self-control slackened, the emotional tenderness which had always been so large an element in his nature became more habitually visible. On one of her latest visits, Lady Burne-Jones tells me, he broke into tears when something was said about the hard life of the poor. He had a longing to hear for the last time some of that older music for which he had so great an admiration. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch brought down a pair of virginals to Kelmscott House, and played to him several pieces by English composers of the sixteenth century. A pavan and galliard by William Byrd were what Morris liked most. He broke into a cry of joy at the opening phrase, and after the two pieces had been repeated at his request, was so deeply stirred that he could not bear to hear any more.
The weariness of that September was also alleviated by the thoughtful kindness of Mr. R.H. Benson, who took to him, one after another, several of the priceless thirteenth-century manuscripts from the Dorchester House library: among them a Psalter written at Amiens, and a book even more fascinating to him, a "Bible Historiée et Vies des Saints" containing, besides initial and marginal ornament of unsurpassed wealth and beauty of invention, no less than one thousand and thirty-four pictures, beginning with the Creation and concluding with the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world, toutes ymaginées et ētitulées et p escripture exposées. This last book he had by him for a week, and though he was too weak to look at it for more than a few minutes together, he always went back to it with fresh delight.
During the last weeks he was attended, beyond his own family, by the untiring devotion of his friends. Miss Mary De Morgan brought to this last service all the skill born of long experience, and the intelligent sympathy of an affection which Morris had for many years cordially returned. Sir Edward and Lady Burne-Jones, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ellis were with him almost daily. Mr. Cockerell was ceaseless in his zeal and care; and Mr. Emery Walker nursed him with the patience and tenderness of a woman. On the morning of Saturday the 3rd of October, between eleven and twelve o'clock, he died quietly and without visible suffering.
No man on earth dies before his day: and least of all can the departure be called premature of a man whose life had been so crowded in activity and so rich in achievement. To one judging by the work done in it, his working day was longer and ampler than often falls to the lot of our brief and pitiable human race. But the specific reasons why that life was not protracted beyond its sixty-third year are not difficult to assign. On the paternal side of his family there was a marked neurotic and gouty tendency. Himself of powerful physique, deep-chested, sound-lunged, big-hearted, he yet carried in him that family weakness, which was developed under the pressure of an immensely busy life. On a constitution made sensitive by gout, the exposure of the years of the Socialist crusade, when he had perpetually spoken in the open air in all weathers, and in the worse than open air of indoor meetings, and had often neglected or forgone proper food and rest, told with fatal effect. "I have no hesitation," his family doctor writes to me, "in saying that he died a victim to his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism." Yet this was only the special form that, in those years, his unceasing and prodigious activity had taken: and these words may be enlarged or supplemented by those of an eminent member of the same profession:
"I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."
"Remembering those early years," says Sir Edward Burne-Jones, "and comparing them with the last in which I knew him, the life is one continuous course. His earliest enthusiams were his latest. The thirteenth century was his ideal period then, and it was still the same in our last talks together; nor would he ever wander from his allegiance. The changes that have come over later impressions about art passed beside him or under him with scarcely any notice."
With all the patience and conciliatoriness of his later years, he remained absolutely unshaken in his loyalty to his old opinions and to his old associates. "He was most tolerable with the opinions of others," are the quaint but touching words of one of his colleagues of the Socialist League. But his own opinions were never withdrawn or concealed; and to the last he could be roused to anger by any slighting words about things for which his own admiration was a fixed article of faith. Among the younger men who came about him in these years were some who, full of the latest ideas and methods in painting, were ready to disparage the work of Burne-Jones. One of them ventured, one day at Kelmscott House, to give some expression of this disparagement, fancying perhaps that Morris might not find it wholly ungrateful. Morris, as his wont was when things were not going to his mind, began to walk about the room and fidget with the things lying on his study table. His visitor continued, undeterred by these warnings. Then Morris broke out. "Look here,," he said, "you mustn't say that sort of thing in mixed company, you know, or you'll run a great chance of being taken for a fool."
For Burne-Jones his own admiration was undulled by their complete and lifelong fraternity, and untouched by any later divergence in social habit or doctrine. Even in matters of art they did not see alike. Just as the restless energy of the one was in strong contrast to the other's patient scholarship and continuous absorption, so they received or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain in the one case of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine. But these very differences only made them the more fully complementary to one another. Morris's deep feeling for Burne-Jones's work is expressed, though in studiously restrained language, in the Birmingham address of 189 1 on the Pre-Raphaelite School. But it may be even better judged from a more casual utterance. Once at the Grange he was—perhaps for the hundredth time—pressing for more and yet more designs for woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press. "You would think," Sir Edward said, turning to me with his wonderful smile, "to listen to Top, that I was the only artist in the world." "Well," said Morris quietly, "perhaps you wouldn't be so far wrong."
With well-meaning persons who came to him for advice or information he had grown wonderfully tolerant. In reply to an earnest correspondent who had asked his views on the subject of temperance, he replied in a letter which deserves record for its exquisite interplay of demure humour and solid sense.
"Dear Sir," he wrote, "I think the question of the advantage of alcoholic liquors is a matter which each man must find out for himself, having admitted that one may easily drink too much even without getting drunk. My own experience is that I find my victuals dull without something to drink, and that tea and coffee are not fit liquors to be taken with food: in fact the latter always disagrees with me palpably, and probably tea isn't good for me. It is a remarkable fact that in Iceland toothache was almost unknown till the introduction of tea and coffee: the latter drink the Icelanders are now much addicted to.
"If I were to say what I really think I should say that tobacco seems to me a more dangerous intoxicant than liquors, because people can and do smoke to excess without becoming beastly and a nuisance. I am sure that Oriental countries have suffered much from the introduction of tobacco. N.B.—I am a smoker myself. A great point would be to try to get the liquors free from adulteration. But that I fear is impossible under a capitalistic régime."
His patience even extended to others less worthy of it: to those who came to him with the more or less concealed intention of getting something to their own advantage out of him, or in order to instruct him on matters in which he had taught their teachers. When his activity in the Socialist movement brought round him a mass of more or less disreputable professing adherents, whose application of the principles of Socialism did not go much beyond the idea that Morris should share his money with them, he carried his indulgence to an extreme pitch. He told a friend of his once that a young man and woman, quite unknown, had called on him and asked him to give them a start, as they were going to be married. "Were they Socialists?" his friend asked. "I don't know," Morris answered; "I suppose so. I gave them five pounds to get rid of them, as I was busy."
The life of insults through which he had passed both before and after he became a Socialist had at last left him almost secure of his own temper. His friend, Mr. Newman Howard, has told me that once when they had been doing business together, he took Morris to his own club, which was a Conservative one. An acquaintance of Mr. Howard's, who did not know Morris, sat down at the same table with them, and opened conversation with Morris by asking, "Well, what do you think of these strikes? I can tell you: it isn't so much the workmen: it's those damned Socialist leaders. They are infernal thieves and rascals, the whole lot of them." Bland and impenetrable, Morris only answered "Indeed," in such a quiet flat voice as made it impossible to continue the subject.
One result of that growing patience was to make him more indifferent to criticism. As much from a certain "childlike shamelessness" which has been noted by one of his most intimate friends as his deepest quality, as from his no less unique self-absorption in his own thoughts and feelings, external criticism had never much affected him. No doubt there must have been a certain loss in this carelessness to the effect which his work, and he himself, made on others. Criticism has its value in letting an artist, or a human being, see, more clearly than he could do of his own self, to what he and his work really amount for his fellow-artists and fellow- creatures: and the absence of sensitiveness in an artist to the effect produced by his work may imply even for the work itself a certain loss of sensitiveness and flexibility. With Morris one often felt that it would make little or no difference to him if no one else ever saw his designs or read his books. Certainly it made no difference to him whether they met with approval from the world, or even from other artists in other methods. He might have taken for his own an ancient Celtic saying: "God has made out of his abundance a separate wisdom for everything that lives, and to do these things is my wisdom."
To criticism of his writings, whether in prose or verse, he was particularly indifferent. In his poems and his prose romances alike, he had set before himself an object or an effect with perfect clearness: how far he had executed his own design, how far fallen short of it, he felt he knew better than any one could teach him; and that his design was not what this or that other person would have chosen, was not what the public liked or understood, was not, in a word, something else instead of being itself, were matters to him of infinite unconcern. The adverse criticisms encountered by his prose romances on the ground of their mannerisms of vocabulary and construction never induced him to modify the diction which he had chosen, and which was in truth natural to him in a much deeper way than modern newspaper English is natural to the ordinary educated writer. The common literary English of the present day Morris denounced as "a wretched mongrel jargon," corresponding in its own vices to the so-called modern architecture. His own prose style, so difficult to the average careless reader, he maintained to be far simpler and more natural. So indeed it essentially is, as may be seen by the sudden contrast, like a patch of bad colour in a tapestry, when from carelessness or weariness or the mere overwhelming force of surroundings, he has here and there allowed his style for a few lines together to slip into modernism. But he confessed mournfully that for working men (and he thought that working men had a natural intelligence at least equal to that of the middle classes) his writing was "too simple to be understood." The debased modern journalistic style, like the debased modern typography, had grown so familiar from universal use, that a reversion to older and purer types threw people out, and made them complain of a difficulty which they quite honestly felt.
"Verse has a privilege to be more old-fashioned than prose," observes one of the most scholarly and accomplished of his critics in discussing "The Roots of the Mountains"; "but Mr. Morris's prose is more old-fashioned than his verse." This is true; it seems, however, to miss or ignore the fact which is essential to a sympathetic understanding of the whole of Morris's work, that in literature as well as in the manual arts he was throughout his life striving to take up and continue the dropped threads of the mediaeval tradition; and that his work in both fields, while it was in one sense completely modern and even in advance of his age, was based on the return to and development of methods which had long since gone out of fashion, if they had not become completely obsolete. To go back to the fourteenth century, not with the view of staying there, but of advancing from it on what he conceived to be the true high road out. of which the arts had long wandered, was his perpetual principle. But it so happens (whether from anything essential to the art or from particular causes to be sought in history) that the fashion of poetry has changed much less since Chaucer's time than the fashion of prose. The English version of the "Gesta Romanorum" (a work which Morris considered to be the perfection of English prose) is, though more recent in date, more old-fashioned than either Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales: or in Chaucer himself, the Tale of Melibœus, or the Treatise on the Astrolabe, is more old-fashioned than the Knight's Tale, or than the Book of Troilus and Cressida. It was some feeling of this sort, in combination with his inveterate love of paradox, that made Morris repeatedly startle his friends by casually alluding to Chaucer as "the great corrupter of the English language." For in matters of style and diction, Chaucer, as is proved by the fact that English poetry made no sensible advance for a hundred and fifty years after him, was far in advance of his own day. Whether Morris's attempt to launch English prose style on this fresh pathway was successful is a different question, and one which perhaps few scholars would hesitate to answer in the negative. But his prose was as sincere, and as little a forced copy of mediæval work, as were his illuminated manuscripts, or his painted windows. This may be a reason, if reason has to be assigned, why none of the various parodies of his style bear much resemblance to the original.
For the refined products of modern ingenuity which did not root themselves back on that old tradition, he had as little taste in literature as in painting. The modern books which in later life he read with the greatest enjoyment were those which, without artifice or distinction of style, dealt with a life, whether actual or imaginary, which approached his ideal in its simplicity and its close relation to nature, especially among a race of people who remained face to face with the elementary facts of life, and had never become fully sophisticated by civilization. In this spirit, he admired and praised works like Mr. Doughty's "Arabia Deserta," or "Uncle Remus," from which he was always willing and eager to read aloud, or "Huck Finn," which he half-jestingly pronounced to be the greatest thing, whether in art or nature, that America had produced. For refinement of style, for subtle psychology in creation, he had but little taste. He could not admire either Meredith or Stevenson. When he was introduced to Ibsen's plays, and called on to join in admiring their union of accomplished dramatic craftsmanship with the most modern movement of ideas, they were dismissed by him in the terse and comprehensive criticism, "Very clever, I must say." But neither did elaboration of style nor advanced modernism of treatment stand in the way of his appreciation when the substance of a book was to his liking; and among the books which in recent years he praised most highly were the masterpieces of Pierre Loti and Maurice Maeterlinck.
"Master of himself and therefore of all near him," Morris at the same time retained the most childlike simplicity in the expression of his actual thoughts or feelings on any subject, and was as little hampered by false shame as he was guided by convention. In some points he remained an absolute child to the end of his life. If you introduced him to a friend, and he had the faintest suspicion that he was there to be shown off, his manners instantly became intolerable. As childlike was another of his characteristics, the constant desire to be in actual touch with the things he loved. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries for no other reason than that he might be part-owner of one of their mediæval painted books. The mere handling of a beautiful thing seemed to give him intense physical pleasure. "If you have got one of his books in your hands for a minute," Burne-Jones said of him, "he'll take it away from you as if you were hurting it, and show it you himself." He never in any case could conceal his hand in a matter of business: but when he was bargaining with Quaritch for an old book of which the possession meant more to him than the price, he would make the fact plain by carrying on the negotiation with the book tucked tightly under his arm, as if it might run away. The resemblance already glanced at between him and Samuel Johnson had grown stronger in these latter years: and it was as visible in his eager width of interest as in the contradictiousness and love of paradox in which he was perhaps excelled by Johnson alone. Both men had this spirit of contradiction constantly acting in curious combination with what was, if not fair-mindedness, at all events an unshaken and fundamental integrity of intellect. Like Johnson, Morris had a way of applying hard logic to matters in which most men are content to be guided by compromise or fashion. Both were acute and severe critics of what is called women's work, and were fastidious in their appreciation of women's dress and looks, yet were little affected by what women thought of them, and preferred men's to women's society. Morris allowed himself to be drawn freely by inquisitive acquaintances, and was ready to lay down the law on any conceivable topic; but any amateur Boswell was liable to be suddenly turned upon and tossed. His large tolerance for bores was united with a keen insight into their character: he would allow one of that class to make heavy drafts on his time, and purse, and patience, and only incidentally note him in a quiet, but scathing phrase, as "hen-headed," or "a sponge," or "a cripple whose smoking flax I have not conscientious boldness enough to quench." Like Johnson ("I am well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity" are the immortal words recorded by Mrs. Thrale), he "looked upon himself as a very polite man," prided himself on his manners, and was capable of the most amazing and almost supernatural rudeness towards both men and women. Many of Johnson's sayings sound most natural in Morris's familiar intonation, and accompanied by his tricks of gesture; and his own familiar talk was full of sentences which, were they inserted in Boswell, could hardly be distinguished from the true Johnsonian context.
But this likeness was crossed and shot by the vein of high romance which coloured all he ever thought or did. In him this turn of mind had all the seriousness, though not the lack of balance, that is associated with the name of Quixotry. Seriousness was what lay deepest of all in him; and the comparison which clings most intimately, of all the many made, in sport or in earnest, by his friends, is one incidentally and lightly dropped, only a few months before his death, by one for whom familiarity had not dulled the edge of observation. The figure seen by him one evening, in the cloak and satchel, the soft hat pulled down over his eyes and the stick firmly grasped and held point forward as he walked straight on, seeming to see nothing of all that was round him—yet in fact seeing it and taking it all in with incomparable swiftness—through the glare and bustle of the Strand, was like one other person and one only, Christian passing through Vanity Fair.
That seriousness and simplicity of mind, even more than the less approachable and intelligible qualities of his lonely genius, was what held his friends to him with a strength of attachment that neither his own inner remoteness nor his swift turns from one interest to another could loosen. They often had a sense of being dragged at his heels, perplexed and out of breath; but they felt through it all that to his own eyes the way lay perfectly straight forward. "He led us all a dance," one of his closest friends said to me in speaking of one of those times when, without troubling himself to give much explanation, or to break his new departure gently to his panting followers, he swung rapidly round on a new front—"not for the first or last time: would he could lead us some more!" For as long as he lived those who knew him felt confident that he would be in the fullest sense, and at every moment, alive: this or that interest might pass, one or another occupation be taken up or discarded, but the interest of living, the occupation of creating and working, would never lessen or falter.
To the same central quality, the seriousness and simplicity which walked, without noticing them, through all the hedges and over all the ditches of worldly convention, it was due that he was so conspicuously at his ease in the society of a class different from his own. Civility to inferiors was certainly not one of his strong points; and the aristocratic temper of his youth would show itself even in his latest years. But it was a temper rather than a principle; in a very real sense he treated his servants or workmen as he treated his social equals; and though he often, in the terse phrase of common usage, wiped his boots on a man, he never either showed or felt towards him the more stinging insolence of condescension. To working men he was like one of themselves, one who worked as they did and lived a quite intelligible life, but who was full of queer, and for the most part fantastic or unintelligible, ideas. Yet many letters received after his death show that working men held him in real honour, and felt a personal grief for the loss of one who had been on their side, who had meant well by them, who had brought to some degree a new meaning into their own life. Such tributes are apt to be paid in an artificial currency; but in these letters a sincere emotion struggles to express itself through the worn and ill-fitting phrases, the stock of cheap ready-made clothing for ideas which the industry and keen intelligence of commercial journalism, copying with a fatal instinct all that is worst in its models, produces wholesale for an ever widening market. In an ill-spelled and touching letter, the Walthamstow Branch of the Navvies' and General Labourers' Union expressed their admiration for his "noble works and genuine counsel," "the seed that so noble a man sowed in his great and useful life." On behalf of a Lancashire Branch of the Social Democratic Federation their secretary wrote, "Comrade Morris is not dead there is not a Socialist living whould belive him dead for he Lives in the heart of all true men and women still and will do so to the end of time." In even simpler words one of the textile workers at Merton Abbey wrote to Mrs. Morris, "Dear Madam, I loved and honoured my Master, therefore I mourn with you, excuse this intrusion, I cannot help it. May God support and comfort you is the prayer of your faithful servant."
In the Northern Sagas, as in the heroic cycle of ancient Greece, a man's life is not fully ended till he has been laid under ground, and the accident of death has been followed by the sacred offices of burial. That reluctance to end the story, to part with its hero until the funeral pyre was out and the last valediction over, was an attitude of mind which Morris himself specially loved; and if we may believe that any sense of the last rites performed over them may touch the dead, he might find a last satisfaction in the simple and impressive ceremony of his funeral. He was buried in the little churchyard of Kelmscott on the 6th of October. The night had been wet, and morning lightened dully over soaking meadows, fading away in a blur of mist. As the day went on, the wind and rain both increased, and rose in the afternoon to a tempest. The storm, which raged with great violence over the whole country, with furious southwesterly gales, reached its greatest force in the upper Thames valley. The low- lying lands were flooded, and all the little streams that are fed from the Cotswolds ran full and deep brown. The noise of waters was everywhere. Clumps of Michaelmas daisies were in flower in the drenched cottage gardens, and the thinning willows had turned, not to the brilliance of their common October colouring, but to a dull tarnished gold. The rooks were silent in the elms about the Manor House. Apples lay strewn on the grass in the orchard. In the garden, the yew dragon, untrimmed since his own hand had last clipped it, had sprouted out into bristles. A few pink roses and sweet peas still lingered among the chrysanthemums and dahlias of the autumnal plots.
One of the farm wagons, with a yellow body and bright red wheels, was prepared in the morning to carry the coffin from Lechlade station; it was drawn by a sleek roan mare and led by one of the Kelmscott carters. The wagon was wreathed with vine, and strewn with willow boughs over a carpeting of moss. In it the coffin, simple and even beautiful in its severe design, of unpolished oak with wrought iron handles, was placed on its arrival, and over it was laid a piece of Broussa brocade which had been long in Morris's possession, and a wreath of bay. The group of mourners followed it along the dripping lanes, between russet hedgerows and silver-grey slabbed stone fences, to the churchyard gate, and up the short lime-avenue to the tiny church. There the Rev. W.F. Adams, Vicar of Little Faringdon, Morris's schoolfellow at Marlborough, and the friend and neighbour of later years at Kelmscott, read the funeral service. With the family and friends were mingled workmen from Merton Abbey and Oxford Street, comrades of the Socialist League, pupils of the Art Workers' Guild, and Kelmscott villagers in their daily working dress. There was no pomp of organized mourning, and the ceremony was of the shortest and simplest. Among associates and followers of later years were the few survivors of that remarkable fellowship which had founded the Oxford Brotherhood and the Firm of Red Lion Square; and at the head of the grave Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the closest and the first friend of all, stood and saw a great part of his own life lowered into earth. "What I should do, or how I should get on without him," he had once said when Morris's increasing weakness became alarming, "I don't in the least know. I should be like a man who has lost his back." Si unus ceciderit, ab altero fulcietur: væ soli! quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se.[1]
As dusk fell, the storm swept more fiercely over Oxford. The driving rain found its way through the roof of the Union Library, and carried away patches of the faded painting with which, in the ardour of his first devotion to art, amid an unbroken band of kindred spirits, confident in youth, united in faith and friendship, he had adorned it thirty-nine years before. A new age had since then risen over a new England, and those early days were already receding into the dimness of an almost fabulous past.
Principes mortales, rem publicam æternam esse: proin repeterent sollennia:[2] the cold and august words of the Roman Emperor may best express the feeling with which that funeral company dispersed to their homes. A great personality had ceased: yet the strongest feeling in the minds of the survivors was rather that it had returned to, than, in the customary phrase of common usage, passed away from earth. Among the men and women through whom he had so often moved as in a dream, isolated, self-centred, almost empty of love or hatred, he moved no more. It seemed natural that he should go out from among them, not being really of them. "He doesn't want anybody," so his most intimate friend once said of him: "I suppose he would miss me for a bit, but it wouldn't change one day of his life, nor alter a plan in it. He lives absolutely without the need of man or woman. He is really a sort of Viking, set down here, and making art because there is nothing else to do." Far less easy to realize was his absence henceforward from the surroundings in which and through which he lived almost as in a bodily vesture: from his books and manuscripts, from his vats and looms, from the grey gabled house and the familiar fields, from the living earth which he loved with so continuous and absorbing a passion.
"It came to pass," says the ancient forgotten author of the Volsunga Saga, when he has to tell of the death of the father of King Volsung, "that he fell sick and got his death, being minded to go home to Odin, a thing much desired of many folk in those days." With no such desire had this last inheritor of the Viking spirit approached his end. To be, "though men call you dead, a part and parcel of the living wisdom of all things," still to live somewhere in the larger life of this and no other world, such had been his desire, such his faith and hope throughout the loneliness and fixedness in which he had passed his mortal days. He might seem, now the entanglement of life was snapped, to have resumed his place among the lucid ranks that, still sojourning yet still moving onward, enter their appointed rest and their native country unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
- ↑ Eclesiastes 4:10: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. (Wikisource-Ed.)
- ↑ Tacitus, Annals, book 3, ch. 6: Princes were mortal; the State was everlasting. Let them then return to their usual pursuits. (Wikisource-Ed.)